What is calendar sync?

One-way writing is the easy half. The system creates appointments and the calendar receives them.

Reading availability is the half that matters more. Without it the system offers slots you have already filled with something it cannot see.

Two-way sync does both, and it is the only version that survives a business where people also book things directly in the calendar.

Say a solo chiropractor connects her practice's Google Calendar for bookings. It works perfectly for three weeks. Then a patient gets confirmed for 4:00 pm on a Thursday, the afternoon of her daughter's recital, which she'd put on her personal calendar in March.

Nothing malfunctioned. Sync only knows about the calendars it's been pointed at, and her life was spread across two. The same gap shows up in smaller ways. An all-day event such as "Conference" is often marked as "free" by default, so it blocks nothing. A tentative invitation she never answered may or may not count as busy, depending on the setting. And a colleague's shared calendar that she can see on her screen isn't necessarily one the booking system can see. In every case the calendar looks full to her eyes and open to the software.

Pick a time tomorrow and create four test entries in different ways. Put a normal one-hour event on the connected calendar. Add an all-day event on another day. Create an event on your personal calendar, if you keep one. Finally, have a colleague invite you to something and leave the invitation unanswered.

Now call your line and ask for each of those times. The normal event should be refused, and if it isn't, stop and fix that before anything else. For the other three, you're learning what your setup treats as busy. There's no universally right answer, but you need to know yours before a patient is sitting in your waiting room while you're at a recital.

The fix for most gaps is simple once you've seen them. Either connect the second calendar as well, or get into the habit of blocking personal commitments on the work calendar with a plain label such as "Unavailable", which keeps the detail private.

Google Calendar and Outlook connect directly, so availability is read live and the appointment appears while the caller is still on the line.

Field-service and practice systems connect through Zapier, and our integration matrix says so rather than showing one undifferentiated grid of logos.

Where something does not connect at all, the matrix states that too. It is more useful than a logo and it is the honest version of a feature page.